A Mystery

I a very interesting paper over at Watt's Up With That a Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach explores the question: Where Are The Corpses?

A recent study in Nature [Thomas 2004] stated that 37% of all species might soon go extinct because of habitat reduction due to global warming. This same prediction of impending mass extinctions from habitat reduction due to global warming has been made a number of times recently, for example in a book by Professor Michael Benton of Bristol University (Benton 2003), as well as in studies by Parmesan and Yohe (Parmesan 2003) and Root et al. (Root 2003).

Habitat reduction has also been cited as being responsible for the continuing extinction of species which is said to have already happened due to the cutting down and fragmentation of tropical forests (Wilson 1995, 2001). For example, a recent study in Conservation Biology (Harris 2004) opens by saying that “Intense deforestation causes massive species losses.” Wilson says that due to habitat reduction we are in the “sixth great wave of extinctions”, comparable in size to the five previous great waves of extinctions in geological time. (Wilson 1992).

Eschenbach does something unusual (although it shouldn't be)--he looks at the record of extinctions over the last 500 years and asks "Where's the Corpses?"

Spoiler: There aren't nearly as many as predicted. But go read the whole thing.